by Greg Dragon
“Scanning.”
While they waited, Dr. Bacero turned to Tim. “And what do you know about Ramon Zappista?”
“Uh, I’m with him.” Tim pointed at Bud. “I…” He searched for a believable answer.
“He’s my research associate,” Bud said. The computer spared him any need for further explanation.
“Scan completed. No foreign objects detected inside prisoner.”
“Thank you.” Dr. Bacero tapped his fingers on his temple. “Would you like to visit him? Seeing you might trigger a response to help me evaluate him.”
The doctor led them through two locked doors and down a dark corridor to Room 17. He smiled when he saw Ramon sitting on the floor of his cell, the first indication his mania had subsided.
“Ramon, there is a visitor for you.” He positioned Bud at the window of the cell door.
“Hi, Ramon. I’m Bud. Remember? I worked for Dr. Graves and met you at his house during The Club’s first meeting.”
Ramon raised his bloodshot eyes, framed by grayish eyelids. “My doctor’s name is Dr. Bacero, not Dr. Graves. I bet he’s standing right next to you out there listening to every single word I say. Hey, man. I need some sounds. I’m going crazy because they got no music here at all. Do me a favor. Run out to my place. Dr. Bacero can give you the address. Get my music machine. The security code to get in the front door is 19 wipeout 74 hang 10. Got it?”
“I don’t need the address. Don’t you remember how I visited you there to get your DNA sample so you could apply for The Club?”
“Huh?”
Dr. Bacero elbowed his way to the window. “If I agree to let you have your music, will you cooperate with my therapy to make you well?”
“Si, senor. Yo estoy un chico bueno.”
* * *
The hacienda looked worse than when Bud had collected Ramon’s DNA sample ten months ago. Weeds now replaced the small patch of once carefully manicured buffalo grass in its front courtyard. Inside, every counter and table was covered by dirty plates, glasses, and silverware. Newspapers and magazines lay next to the chair facing a nine by twelve-foot screen. Scenes from The World Music Channel flashed on it. Tim covered his ears until Bud found the remote control to kill the sound blaring from the thirty small speakers hanging near the ceiling along the living room’s four walls.
“Talk about a bachelor pad.” He shook his head while shuffling through a stack of memos and contracts and unopened mail.
“What are you doing? You can’t go through his things like that, Tim.”
“Listen, Bud. So far, you’re batting about a dismal .120, not even enough to make it in the minor leagues. Ramon didn’t verify anything about your story. And now it turns out he doesn’t have any implant in him either. I’m helping you out by trying to find something to connect him to that Club story of yours.”
“Okay. But hurry up. We’re leaving after I find his music box.”
* * *
Ramon smiled as Dr. Bacero handed him the one-inch black cube. He cradled it as if it were his baby. When the sound of his favorite song began, he closed his eyes and lay down on the bed in the cell that had replaced the one with padded walls. Dr. Bacero motioned for Tim and Bud to leave so he could begin to try and unravel the mystery of Ramon’s mania.
* * *
The train ride back to San Diego seemed endless for Tim. Why couldn’t Bud shut up and enjoy the scenery for once?
“I’ll give you this much, Bud,” Tim said. “Ramon sure knows his music. That worksheet I found back at his hacienda proves that much.”
“What worksheet? Why didn’t you tell me about it before now? Was it connected to The Club?”
“Nah. He was working on isolating the hooks of the top 1,000 songs from 1963 to 1973. I bet he wants to use them whenever he sets up his office in Los Angeles.”
“Hooks? What’s that mean?”
“You know, it’s the part of the song that hooks the listeners and makes them want to hear it again and maybe even buy it, like those Mexican trumpet sounds on Ring of Fire or that sax solo on I Feel Good.”
“Who sang those songs?”
“Johnny Cash did Ring of Fire and James Brown sang I Feel Good.”
“Never heard of them.”
“That’s what’s wrong with your generation, you don’t know any of the great classic hit songs.”
“I listen to that radio station that plays songs from the fifties, sixties, and seventies sometimes.”
“But that’s when Johnny Cash and James Brown were big. Don’t they play any of their music on that station?”
“They play stuff from the 2050s, 2060s, and 2070s, not from the 1900s. Sorry, but songs over a hundred years old aren’t my strong point. That’s ancient history.”
Tim decided to educate Bud.
“Ramon’s list also had songs by Ray Charles, Roy Orbison, Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Who, Beach Boys, Aretha Franklin, Jefferson Airplane, Supremes, Association, Temptations, and some groups I never heard of, like Pink Floyd and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Talk about weird names. Must have been all the drugs they were taking back then.”
His laughter faded after he noticed Bud’s disappointed expression. “Look, it’s okay. Give me 100 more credits so we can call it quits.”
19
The blank screen seemed to mock Tim, daring him to fill it with words.
He had sold the stories about Manuel and his family in Ensenada and the one about escapes, wholesome and otherwise, available at Cheyenne River Standing Rock Reservation. But Bud’s crazy book idea that starred him, Dr. Graves, and The Club had been strike one, the story about the Mars project, strike two, and the one about the Fixed Baby Boomer Generation coming of age strike three.
Every editor contacted had sung variations on a theme: “We recently did a story on that,” or, “Sorry, but it does not fit our needs at this time.” Unscrupulous editors then assigned Tim’s two article ideas to one from their stable of writers. After all, “you can’t copyright an idea,” was a never ending mantra of the trade.
Moose jumped onto Tim’s computer table and nudged his cheek with her cold, wet nose. He pet her and asked, “You think I should become a travel writer, cat? It’s the only thing that I can sell any more.”
Washed up? No, at least not quite yet.
Streak of bad luck?
Over the hill? Tim went to the mirror in his bathroom and studied the wrinkles, gray hairs, and growing bald spot on his head. Turning sixty in a few months no longer seemed irrelevant. Maybe the life of a writer is a youngster’s game, he thought. That’s when he had enjoyed success at it, in his twenties and thirties, when all his stories had been published.
Now?
He did not like thinking about the present. He could not begin to draw Social Security at a reduced rate until age sixty-six; and at the full rate until age seventy, which seemed to be a lifetime away.
The rest of the morning he sent out resumes, a sure sign of a desperate, drowning man, he thought. He was ready to stop for his first meal of the day when his vision phone interrupted.
“Incoming call from Bud Lee.”
Because it had been a month since their trip to Mexico and his last contact with the one he nicknamed the dreamer, Tim hesitated. Moose decided for him by walking across the computer’s keyboard. One of the fifteen keys her paws touched accepted the call.
Tim coughed. “Hello, Bud. Long time no—”
“Tim, wait until you hear what I have planned now.”
Tim’s lightheadedness ratcheted up to dizziness. “Uh, can I call you back? I haven’t eaten all day long and feel like I’m getting ready to pass out.”
“Okay. I’ll be waiting for your call.”
Tim prepared scrambled eggs topped with imitation cheddar cheese made from soy beans. After dumping them on a slice of bread, he squirted catsup on them, “for my veggie serving,” and added a second slice of bread to “the meal that contains all the essential food groups.”
He ate slowly, while Moose crouched at his feet for any morsel that might fall her way. He then savored his last Choco-Calmer, a candy bar he hoped would help him to not be sarcastic or condescending to Bud.
“Hello?” Bud’s face filled the vision phone’s two-inch screen.
“What’s cooking, Bud? You find an agent for your book yet?”
“Not yet. But wait until you hear what I worked out with my dad.”
Tired from a nonproductive day topped off by an unexpected and unwelcome invitation to re-enter the rabbit hole he had descended into six weeks earlier at Barney’s, Tim tried to end the call. But scenes of working in an office somewhere under watchful eyes made him keep listening. Twenty minutes later, he agreed to Bud’s new plan.
Tim then called Bethany to make arrangements to leave Moose with her “for a while.”
“I need you to be the WIC, the watch-cat in charge and take care of Bethany and Charles while I’m gone,” Tim told his pet as he shoved Moose into her cat carrier, a cage she hated.
When released at the home she had grown up in, Moose ran for the first available hiding place.
* * *
The docks at Long Beach looked even more crowded than the last time Tim had visited them, eleven years earlier, while researching a story about the Asians being smuggled into America on ships originating in China, Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. His expose had resulted in greater security and more customs agents at the United States’ busiest port.
Bud had described the ship as big, but Tim blinked when he first saw it.
The China Queen was one-third of a mile long and boasted a top speed of fifty-two knots an hour. It was capable of carrying up to 17,203 metal shipping containers filled with aluminum, glass, paper, plastic, steel, wood, and anything else that could be recycled for reuse by China’s 1.6 billion population. Ever since Russia had completed its Trans Russian pipeline running thousands of miles to China, the U.S. no longer supplied oil to China, but recycles brought top dollar and had become America’s number one export.
Its nine-man crew monitored the computers controlling the vessel’s speed, course, and internal temperatures, a pleasant 72 degrees in the cabins, galley, mess, and bridge, and 58 degrees below decks. Destination for this trip: Hong Kong.
Ordinarily a routine crossing of 6,363 nautical miles, on this voyage there would be a slight detour to deliver two passengers. The captain met them on his bridge as his ship’s nuclear powered engines steered the behemoth westward from the harbor.
“Welcome aboard.” The captain bowed. “Your cruise will be enjoyable if you do not interfere with any of the crew’s duties. Please make any of your requests for anything known to my first mate or me.”
* * *
By the second night at sea, Tim’s body still struggled to adapt to the ever present sensation of forward and side-to-side movements. His dreams responded with vivid symbols that awoke him at 2:11 a.m. Unable to doze off, he climbed from his bunk into his boots and left Bud asleep in their 80-square-foot cabin.
Once on deck, he clung to the four-foot high steel rail between him and the inky darkness and waves 130 feet below him. He decided a couple of laps around the upper deck would tire him enough to get at least a few more hours of sleep. As he rounded a corner near the ship’s bow, movement below on a lower deck stopped him.
Tim counted five shadowy figures near the bow’s tip. One wore the distinctive cap of the captain. The others worked in pairs. They took turns moving to a shipping container. Each pair of workers removed objects shrouded in some sort of black material. After carrying each one to the rail, they paused while the captain read something from a book. Then they slid each object over the rail into the sea.
Tim counted forty-three bundles being tossed into the sea before the routine ended. Whatever slid overboard ranged in length from about three to six feet long, probably bodies, he concluded. Full of questions for Bud, Tim crawled to a bend in the rail. Once around the other side of the rectangular structure with the recreation area, he would be out of sight of those gathered at the bow. He turned the corner and bumped into a crewmember pulling watch.
The wiry sailor gawked at Tim, and then yelled at those by the bow. He shouted something in Cantonese to them and the captain answered with an order.
* * *
Taken to the captain’s quarters, Tim tried polite conversation. But compliments about “the wonderful boat that you run, Captain” brought no answer, not even a change of expression. The captain’s stoic manner reminded Tim of Chan Lee when he had brokered the deal exempting himself from any part of his son’s book. Even the arrival of a yawning Bud did not alter the captain’s displeasure. They conversed in Cantonese without translation for Tim.
After five minutes of discussion, the captain rose and left. His bow at Tim appeared so slight and rushed it seemed more of an insult than show of respect.
“What’s going on? Am I going to have to walk the plank?” Tim asked. “I couldn’t sleep, so I went for a walk. Look, I hope you told him I’m not going to tell anyone about what I saw them doing, okay?”
“You got that much right. You do and you just might end up falling overboard. He wants all of our communication devices until we go ashore.” Bud held out his hand. “Give me your smart watch.”
Two days passed before a crew member assigned to Tim stopped following him. At night, another stood guard outside their cabin. Then the guard duty ended.
“They run out of bodies?” Tim asked.
“Very funny, wise guy,” Bud said. “Look, some Asians do not like California laws about having to be cremated once they die.”
“Tough luck. There isn’t any room left to bury people in that state anymore.”
“So, for a fee, my father lets survivors have their family members buried at sea.”
“The U.N. would have a hissy fit if they found out. Polluting the ocean is a major no-no for them.”
“I know.” Bud shrugged. “But tradition trumps global correctness. Isn’t that what your friend Brent said?”
* * *
Tensions aboard the China Queen faded after the Marshall Islands came into view the following day. Because of her size, the ship could not dock at any of the many island’s ports. So a fishing boat met it two miles from land. This time the captain bowed fully to bid farewell to the two so disrespectful of his command. He uttered something to Bud.
“What did he say?” Tim asked.
“May you live in interesting times,” Bud translated.
Tim smiled and extended his hand. “Thanks, Captain. Hope there is no hard feelings.”
The captain did a hasty about face and marched to his bridge.
The fisherman taking them to the islands’ capital knew minimal English. But that did not keep him from extending his palm once they docked. Bud pulled a faded fifty dollar bill of the paper currency preferred by many of the islands’ inhabitants.
At their hotel, Tim complained that the island was swaying, just as the ship had.
“It will take you a day or two to adjust,” Bud said. “My dad took me on my first ocean voyage when I was five.”
That afternoon, Tim toured the island, taking notes on every beach and business geared for tourists, because an editor back in SLD had proved agreeable to any story, “if they are interesting like the ones you did on South Dakota and Baja California.”
Tim’s absence allowed Bud to begin searching for Ahomana, otherwise known as Mr. Island Nations, the name given to him at The Club’s meeting. While Bud went from the office to his home and to his business in pursuit of Ahomana, he prayed he might reach him before Dr. Graves could disable him, probably by remote command to his implant. He wondered if that had caused Ramon Zappista’s mania.
Crazy people just don’t communicate very well, he thought as he climbed into his third taxi since arriving. And at the rate I’m going, I don’t know who’s making me crazier – Dr. Graves, Tim, or my dad.
20
Ahomana had returned the day before from a trip to Japan to meet with officials about their nation’s possible entry into the Island Nation Federation. After listening to his pitch, they smiled, bowed, fed him sushi and rice, washed down by sake, bowed again, and said, “sayonara.”
“They don’t want to join the INF because they’re afraid they will become a cash cow like Germany did for the European Union seventy years ago.” As he gave his report, Ahomana did not focus on the INF president, an Australian whose face filled his vision phone’s screen. “And Indonesia doesn’t want their Islamic culture tainted by infidel nations like yours and mine.”
“Keep after them,” she said. “I’ll put some pressure on them at the Pacific Pan Regional Conference in Manila next month. Have to sign off. Duty calls. See you in Manila.”
Ahomana waved goodbye and tapped the button linking his computer to cameras on twenty-seven of the Marshall Islands’ most populated islands. The scenes of beaches, palm and breadfruit trees, crystal blue waters, and occasional smiling face removed the stress of his failure with the Japanese. He was tiring of being Ambassador-at-Large for the Island Nation Federation and had wanted to tell its president that before she ended her call. In his estimation, he had become a salesman.
And I don’t even get a commission or salary, just all expenses paid.
He remembered happier times as a boy fishing with Grandfather, who taught him how to respect, fear, and love the world’s largest ocean. His secretary cut short his daydream of simpler days.
“Here are the three letters for you to e-sign.” She handed him the device into which she dictated all of his correspondence. “You have a meeting tomorrow at the Rongelap Chamber of Commerce.” She noticed his far off gaze, as if he were a million miles away. “Are you even listening to me?”
“Huh? The chamber of commerce meeting…”
His ability to retain essential details amazed her. “Oh, and an American came by looking for you, a Mr. Bud Lee.”